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Visitors to the renowned gallery are familiar to unusual experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, glided down spiral slides, and witnessed AI-powered sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nasal passages of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this immense space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a labyrinthine structure modeled after the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can meander around or chill out on skins, listening on headphones to tribal seniors telling tales and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It may appear whimsical, but the exhibit pays tribute to a rarely recognized scientific wonder: researchers have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the creature to survive in harsh Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "creates a sense of smallness that you as a person are not dominant over nature." Sara is a ex- writer, children's author, and land defender, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that generates the chance to change your outlook or evoke some humbleness," she states.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The winding installation is one of several components in Sara's absorbing commission honoring the culture, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They have faced persecution, cultural suppression, and eradication of their language by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the work also highlights the community's struggles connected to the climate crisis, property rights, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Components

At the long entry ramp, there's a soaring, 26-meter formation of skins trapped by electrical wires. It represents a metaphor for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this component of the installation, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, wherein solid coatings of ice appear as fluctuating weather melt and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' key cold-season food, lichen. Goavvi is a outcome of planetary warming, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Far North than elsewhere.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they carried carts of food pellets on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to provide manually. The reindeer gathered round us, pawing the frozen ground in futility for lichen-covered morsels. This costly and labour-intensive procedure is having a drastic effect on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. But the alternative is starvation. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others suffocating after falling into water bodies through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the installation is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Perspectives

The installation also emphasizes the clear difference between the modern interpretation of power as a commodity to be exploited for gain and existence and the Sámi outlook of energy as an innate power in creatures, individuals, and the environment. This venue's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by regional governments. While attempting to be exemplars for clean sources, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, water power facilities, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their legal protections, ways of life, and traditions are at risk. "It's challenging being such a small minority to defend yourself when the justifications are rooted in saving the world," Sara notes. "Extractivism has appropriated the discourse of ecology, but still it's just striving to find alternative ways to continue habits of use."

Family Conflicts

Sara and her relatives have themselves disagreed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent policies on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's sibling initiated a set of finally failed legal cases over the required reduction of his livestock, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara developed a four-year set of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge drape of four hundred cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For many Sámi, visual expression is the sole sphere in which they can be listened to by the global community. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|